Commie Pervert Geek Girl, Nov 2004
Originally published in Express

The internet has revolutionised society in may ways, including providing an unprecedented forum for people to share their creative endeavours with a wider audience. This encouragement for people to participate in creative activity, not just passively absorb the product of the entertainment industry, is certainly a positive development.

One example is the growth of fan fiction. Any good story will leave people wondering "what happens next?" or "what if X had happened instead of Y?" or "how would those characters have responded to situation Z?" With fanfic, people get to explore these alternative possibilities in the worlds of their favourite books or TV shows. And a perennial favourite question is "what if this character loved that character?"

The answer is explored in the class of fanfic known as slash, a name taken from the punctuation between the names of a particular pairing - Kirk/Spock being one of the most long-standing examples (even commented on in the novelisation of the first Star Trek movie a quarter of a century ago!). Slash featuring just about any conceivable pairing of characters can be found, from Xena/Gabrielle to Jeeves/Wooster.

It should be no surprise that same-sex pairings are particularly prominent in fanfic. As mainstream entertainment is so relentlessly heterosexual, the need for fanfic to present alternatives is correspondingly great. There's also the appeal of boy-on-boy slash fic to women - and not just straight women! A high proportion of fanfic readers and writers are female, including many queer women of my acquaintance.

One of the most remarkable slash romances is the deep and abiding love between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. One site, Fanfiction.net, currently lists well over a hundred thousand Harry Potter fanfics, and their listing is by no means complete. Not all of these are Harry/Draco romances, of course, but the pairing is phenomenally popular.

In JK Rowling's novels, Draco is just a two-dimensional bully. But in the imaginations of thousands of amateur writers, he has been developed in to a much more rounded, ambiguous, real character. Draco's family ties with the forces of evil conflict with the attraction between Harry and himself to provide plenty of scope for compelling storytelling. Or plotless smut, depending on the author.

So what does Ms Rowling think about these takes on her characters? And does it matter? In my opinion, no, it doesn't. All writers make use of source material - should Rowling have been required to get permission from the British government to write books set in Britain? The inspirations for fanfic may be more blatant than "original" fiction, but that doesn't mean that any less true creativity is involved in crafting the story.

Once a story is released in to the wild, people should be free to build upon it as they wish. The audience is giving up their time, enthusiasm, and passion to these stories, and nobody has the right to tell them that they can't do anything with the ideas once they're in their heads. "Consume, don't think" might be the attitude of capitalist entertainment corporations, but it's a very unhealthy one. Society benefits most when ideas and stories can spread and develop freely.